Justin Kurzel
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The Matrix (1999)
Directed by Lana Wachowski
influenced Assassin's Creed (2016)
Visuals Themes Characters
20th Century Fox undoubtedly was interested, as it gives them a chance to try and tap into the huge popularity of those that played the video game, while it also has a vague merging of The Matrix and Game Of Thrones.
The effect of Aguilar daringly leaping from eave to eave isn't enhanced by watching Callum get hoisted around like a puppet any more than The Matrix would have benefited from lengthier shots of Neo lying supine on a bed.
As cold and weird as anything a major American studio has released since they started gearing all of their products for a Chinese audience — it borrows almost as much from “Under the Skin” as it does “The Matrix” — Kurzel’s film illustrates how free will can wiggle its way into the franchise system, how the messiness of bloodshed can be the only way to break free from the shackles of bloodlines.
Fassbender takes on the role of Callum Lynch, a modern-day criminal saved from execution and forced to enter the memories of an Inquisition-era Assassin, as if he were playing Neo from “The Matrix” crossed with Hamlet.
The result feels like a cross between The Matrix and a second-rate Dan Brown novel.
A collision between moody, smoky swords-and-daggers historical fantasy and sleek modern-day sci-fi, the overall dimension-shattering vibe is more like The Matrix.
Ya sabemos a lo que vamos cuando compramos un boleto para una adaptación de videojuegos: hay muy pocas posibilidades de revertir una maldición que se instaló con Super Mario Bros .
Not since the “Super Mario Bros.” film — with Dennis Hopper as a man-dinosaur and people turned into fungi — has a film gone so over and beyond to punch up a game too thin for the cinema.
Think cinematic disasters like Super Mario Bros., Wing Commander, Alone in the Dark and many others that have categorically cemented the near-impossibility of making a beloved video game property work as a narrative feature film.
While there’s the occasional win (“Wreck It Ralph”), this genre is awash with the critically reviled ( “Pixels” ) and box office losers (“Super Mario Bros.,” “Doom,” “Double Dragon”).
El último par de años, fueron las prometedoras —pero desgraciadamente decepcionantes— “ Warcraft ”, del talentoso Duncan Jones (“Luna”), y “ Assassin’s Creed ”, la cual desperdició a mucha gente capaz, tanto frente a cámaras (Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard), como detrás de las mismas (Justin Kurzel, director de la notable “Macbeth”).
For a character who began life as a video game avatar, she’s quite human – and certainly more so than the protagonists in past video-game adaptations (including the hero played by Vikander’s real-life husband, Michael Fassbender, in the 2016 debacle Assassin’s Creed).
To be fair, the last quarter century hasn’t given much room to think otherwise: from Super Mario Bros. to the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movies, all the way to Assassin’s Creed , it’s just difficult to translate the rhythms and mechanics of a video game to the intricate, character-driven dynamics of cinema.
The setting—a public square, presided over by face-painted priests and royals and populated by a pious mob—is modeled after a Francisco Rizi painting but baked in the frenzied mold of Mad Max: Fury Road, with religious grotesques clamoring for the blood of heretics.
The archery, the sword fighting, the leaping off of buildings…it all reminded me of the film Assassin’s Creed starring Michael Fassbender.
A loaded orphan who lives in a giant keep above a mining town, Robin spends his time dressing up as a thief and perfecting his “Assassin’s Creed” cosplay as he skulks around the local barns.
This is the new “Robin Hood” for a generation that grew up on superhero movies and “Assassin’s Creed,” and it fails on almost every level.
Like Guy Ritchie’s recent, slightly less terrible variation on King Arthur, the film owes more to Assassin’s Creed than it does to any ancient chronicles.
If the action is a speed-ramped eyesore, supplying Robin’s arrow-firing exploits the fast-slow-fast cadence of a Zack Snyder superhero brawl, the overriding aesthetic is closer to Assassin’s Creed : Decked out in a darker, more fashionable shade of green, Egerton’s hooded prince of thieves races across the rooftops and narrow wooden walkways of a Nottingham that seems to have been city-planned with parkour in mind.
Past lives recall Assassin’s Creed .
McCauley, similarly, is beholden to the film’s mechanics and the late-in-the-game introduction of Assassin’s Creed–like concepts, involving digitally diving into past lives to learn new information and skills.
Unsurprisingly, Infinite swipes a bit of everything effective from similar such endeavors released since 1998 — The Matrix here, Wanted there, Assassin’s Creed and The Old Guard everywhere (especially with the presence of Guard co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor here as the heel).
Just when it seems like “Assassin’s Creed” and “The Matrix” are going to be locked in a custody battle for control over where this is all going, Chiwetel Ejiofor shows up in Morpheus cosplay to tip the balance with a silly, unpretentious performance that also screams: “Remember when I was in a marginally better version of this movie last summer?”
But there have been previous works, including Paul Greengrass’s July 22, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and the dozens of films that have captured the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, that have had to contend with the same issues, and also faced similar backlash.
Although Kurzel’s recuperation lands after a long line of films reimagining mass shootings, from Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) to two recent attempts at the 2011 murders in Oslo and beyond, it’s a painfully familiar narrative striving to highlight an odyssey of dehumanization.
For that matter, Kurzel’s film — for all its grimness — has a few moments of striking visual grandeur, some of which is on a par with John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981).
With so much fighting and bleeding and emoting in the misty countryside, it was hard not to think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
As the mostly-absent medium, Seylan Baxter (one of the witches from Justin Kurzel’s re-staging of Macbeth in 2015) is also effective, for it’s not so much the ludicrousness of this environment or these beliefs, but channeling the proper mood when we understand and empathize with those who do.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominik
influenced True History of the Kelly Gang (2019)
Visuals
It’s not only an original take on the story, but a shocking and startling accomplishment in filmmaking that can only be described as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as directed by Paul Verhoeven.
It’s easy to imagine that Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was Kurzel’s template for how to unpack to the mysticism that comes so inherent with a well trodden folk story.
There have been a handful of mildly enjoyable ones though with Mortal Kombat and Warcraft: The Beginning, and guilty pleasures like Street Fighter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
The film is coming off 20 years of soullessly trashy and forgettable video-game spinoffs (the “Mortal Kombat” and “Streetfighter” films, “Max Payne” and “BloodRayne,” the “Lara Croft” series, this year’s “Warcraft”).
There have been a handful of mildly enjoyable ones though with Mortal Kombat and Warcraft: The Beginning, and guilty pleasures like Street Fighter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
In the case of Justin Kurzel—an Australian director making only his second feature, after the gritty thriller The Snowtown Murders—that means if you're going to make another Macbeth, you'll be measuring up to interpretations of the same material made by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Roman Polanski.
In case it’s been a while since high school English class, or since you’ve watched previous film adaptations of “Macbeth” by Roman Polanski or Orson Welles : In 11th-Century Scotland, the great warrior Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, receives a prophecy from three witches that he will be king someday.
Over the years, Shakespeare’s Macbeth has attracted some of cinema’s heaviest hitters: Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, Akira Kurosawa (whose Throne Of Blood transposes the play to feudal Japan).
A better comparison might be Justin Kurzel, who made the “Assassin’s Creed” movie.
The opening few minutes of Paul W.S. Anderson’s “Monster Hunter” are such a delightful eruption of unfettered, goofy-ass, who-cares-what-your-parents-think nerdcore that it seems as if the director of 1995’s “Mortal Kombat” (and the “Resident Evil” series after that) has reset video game movies back to the good old days when they weren’t bogged down by delusions of respectability — when they were memorably bad instead of just dull or “Assassin’s Creed.”
While there’s the occasional win (“Wreck It Ralph”), this genre is awash with the critically reviled ( “Pixels” ) and box office losers (“Super Mario Bros.,” “Doom,” “Double Dragon”).
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)
Directed by Chad Stahelski
influenced by Assassin's Creed (2016)
Visuals
There’s undeniably a mythic appeal to John Wick ’s ornate world-building, which in Parabellum rather amusingly incorporates details that seem to have been lifted directly from the Assassin’s Creed video game series.
Parabellum ’s escalation, which feels more fitting of, say, Assassin’s Creed , doesn’t quite hit the mark.
There have been a handful of mildly enjoyable ones though with Mortal Kombat and Warcraft: The Beginning, and guilty pleasures like Street Fighter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
What lazier way is there to ignite the box office than to use established brands like Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed to draw in fans for easy money?
The kind of movie that opens with a wall of dopey text about an ancient grudge and the violence it makes possible for our viewing pleasure (like “Star Wars,” but slightly ashamed of itself), “Assassin’s Creed” begins during the Spanish Inquisition, where a man named Aguilar de Nerha (Fassbender, enjoyably terse) leads a secret brotherhood of killers as they plot to protect a relic called “The Apple of Eden” from the rival Knights Templar.
Unless a movie is part of the Star Wars franchise, it’s generally a bad sign to open with an expository text crawl, and Assassin’s Creed never stops expositing over its entire dragged-out runtime.
Super Mario Bros. tenía esos saltos horribles que emulaban los ataques del juego, Resident Evil tuvo los sustos espontáneos de zombies escondidos –y, claro, perritos infectados–, y Mortal Kombat jugaba con la música, las tomas laterales y los combates ascendentes.
To be fair, I said the same thing about Warcraft, and the first Resident Evil, the first Silent Hill movie, Prince of Persia, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and so on and so forth.
Sorting out the hows and whys of Knights, Assassins, apples, and Jeremy Irons would be less of a concern (or chore) if Kurzel made the movie a distinctive visual experience, like the better Resident Evil and Underworld movies.
If you do like Paul WS Anderson movies — movies like Resident Evil and Pompeii — you might like Assassin’s Creed.